Under siege from regulators, big tech companies launch AI charm offensive in Europe | Wilnesh News

PARIS, France — U.S. tech giants touted the benefits of artificial intelligence for humanity this week at one of Europe’s biggest industry events, showcasing its allure as global regulators work to curb harms associated with the technology.

At the Viva Tech conference in Paris on Wednesday, Amazon Chief Technology Officer Werner Vogels and Google Senior Vice President of Technology and Society James Manyika talked about the huge potential that artificial intelligence can unlock for economies and communities.

Notably, their comments come as the EU’s Artificial Intelligence Act, the world’s first major law governing artificial intelligence, receives final approval. Regulators are looking to curb harm and misuse of the technology, such as misinformation and copyright abuse.

Meanwhile, European Commissioner Thierry Breton, a key author of big tech rules, will give a speech later this week.

Vogels tasked with driving technology innovation internally Amazonsaying artificial intelligence can be used to “solve some of the world’s most difficult problems.”

He said that while artificial intelligence has the potential to make all kinds of businesses successful, “at the same time, we need to use some of these technologies responsibly to solve some of the world’s most difficult problems.”

Vogels said it’s important to talk about “artificial intelligence now” — in other words, how the technology is currently benefiting people around the world.

He cited the example of how Jakarta, Indonesia, is using artificial intelligence to connect small rice farm owners with financial services. Artificial intelligence can also be used to build a more efficient supply chain for rice, which he calls “the most important staple food” with 50% of the world’s population relying on it as the main source of food.

Manyika, who oversees Google and letter Regarding responsible innovation, he said that artificial intelligence can bring huge benefits from a health and biotechnology perspective.

He said that a version of Google’s recently released Gemini AI model is tailored for medical applications and can understand context related to the medical field.

Google DeepMind, the key unit behind the company’s artificial intelligence work, has also released a new version of its AlphaFold 3 artificial intelligence model that can understand “all molecules of life, not just proteins” and has made the technology available to researchers.

Manyika also pointed to innovations the company recently announced at the Google I/O conference in Mountain View, California, including new “watermarking” technology for identifying AI-generated text as well as previously launched images and audio.

Manyika said that Google has open sourced its watermarking technology so that any developer can “build on it and improve it.”

“I think it’s going to take an effort from all of us, and these are some of the things, especially in a year like this where a billion people around the world are voting, so concerns about misinformation are important,” Manica said. These are some of the things we should be paying attention to.”

Manica also emphasized that many of the innovations brought by Google come from engineers in its French center and emphasized that Google is committed to sourcing most innovations from within the EU.

He said that Google’s recently launched Gemma AI is a lightweight open source model that was developed vigorously at the US Internet giant’s French technology center.

Manica’s comments came a day after the European Union approved the Artificial Intelligence Act, a groundbreaking piece of legislation that sets out sweeping rules governing artificial intelligence.

The Artificial Intelligence Act takes a risk-based approach to artificial intelligence, meaning that different applications of the technology are treated differently based on the perceived threat they pose.

“Sometimes I worry when all our narratives focus only on risk,” Manica said. “These are very important, but we should also be thinking, why are we building this technology?”

“All the developers in the room are thinking about, how do we improve society, how do we build businesses, how do we do imaginative, innovative things to solve some of the world’s problems.”

He said Google is committed to balancing innovation with “responsibility” and “being thoughtful about whether this will harm people in any way, whether this will benefit people in any way, and how we continue to study these things.”

Big U.S. tech companies have struggled to win favor with regulators amid criticism that their vast operations adversely affect smaller companies in areas such as advertising, retail and media production.

Specifically, with the advent of artificial intelligence, opponents of big tech companies worry that new advanced generative AI systems will destroy jobs, exploit copyrighted material as training data, and generate misinformation and harmful content.

Last week, at the “Choose France” foreign investment summit, Microsoft and Amazon signed a commitment to invest a total of 5.2 billion euros ($5.6 billion) in cloud and artificial intelligence infrastructure and jobs in France.